June 2, 2011 · 11:24 am

Aristotle’s Poetics and Epic Poetry

Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle’s Poetics and Epic Poetry

As of May 27, 2011, I’ve revised each book of The Parliament of Poets through Book VII, since finishing the full rough draft of the entire epic in early February. Past the half way mark of revision feels very good and inspires me to want to push on through the rest of it during the next several weeks, perhaps before the end of the summer, a readable draft of the entire book.

It was as a young poet, holed up in some rental room or house, choosing to live in poverty in order to have the time to study and write, in Detroit or in the country, none of my family or friends understanding what I was doing, that I first read Aristotle’s Poetics, some thirty-five years ago. I reread it many times, or parts of it, going back to it through the years. It is the touchstone of the literary art….

Now available in

The Myth of the Enlightenment: Essays
Forthcoming, September, 2014.

https://www.earthrisepress.net/myth_of_the_enlightenment.html

Frederick Glaysher

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March 31, 2011 · 3:26 am

Michigan from a Great Height

Michigan

Michigan from a Great Height

Michigan from a Great Height

March 31, 2011

I was climbing with someone up a great hill that became nearly a mountain. It was a beautiful Michigan day, in the afternoon, as we walked through green and open spaces, rising above the trees and forest. I sensed I was in the Upper Peninsula or the northern part of the lower peninsula, looking south.

I reached and stood on a very high hillock at the top of the gentle, sloping mountain, overlooking the land, my companion standing below. All was spread out before me, beautiful and green, blue lakes scattered in the countryside of Michigan.

I awoke recalling that I have had this dream before, perhaps many times, recognizing it as so. It was a very pleasant dream. I felt happy and content, as I was led up toward the top of the rising land. The import was that my guide was showing me something of great moment and beauty, and there it was, spread out and lying below. A glorious land as far as I could see.

Frederick Glaysher

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March 3, 2011 · 4:22 am

Maternal Haplogroup T2f1

The Sorcerer, Les Trois Freres, 13,000 BCE

Maternal Haplogroup T2f1

March 3, 2011

What does 45,000 years of mitochondrial DNA mean? It ought to mean something beyond the shock and awe it inspires in me, not that I imagine I’m unique. What human being doesn’t have 45,000 years of genome? It’s merely I have scientific proof of it now staring me in the face, not an abstraction, linking me to human beings in today’s Middle East, who had migrated out of Africa, with my T2 sub-mutation at less than 33,000 BCE, some taking the T marker into Pakistan and India, back into Eastern Africa, and then into the Basque region at about 15,000 BCE, with the retreating of the glaciers.

I had learned last year when my son had had his genome tested that our paternal line has a mutation reaching back 20,000 years BCE to the Franco-Cantabrian region of Spain and France, inspiring me to test my own genome separately, now dating it at about 17,000 BCE. I’ve always known my mother’s ancestry extended from Croatia and Germany, but incredibly her lineage must have had a connection as well to the area of the ancient caves.

Mitochondrial Eve. Ancestor shamans stare out at me.

Paternal Haplogroup R1b1b2a1a2

Frederick Glaysher

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February 6, 2011 · 4:37 am

The Parliament of Poets

Earthrise, Apollo 11

Earthrise, Apollo 11

The Parliament of Poets

February 4, 2011

Book XII

Mbeku, the flying African tortoise, like the last stage of a Saturn V rocket, propels us out of earth orbit into a quarter of a million miles to the moon, 25,000 miles per hour, clutching me in his feathered arms, his cracked shell pointing backwards at the moon, hurtling, pirouetting, twirling, in the weightlessness of space, in brilliant white sunlight, in the blackest black of eternity, through timelessness, into the future.

Back to the Sea of Tranquility, back to the descent stage of the Lunar Module, of Apollo 11.  Third time on the moon, the Poet of the Moon, more times than any astronaut. After a long journey, arduous, an ordeal.

The far side of the moon, as dark as the dark night of the soul. The starry cosmos, a universe of galaxies, sextillions of stars. Lunar sunrise. Earthrise…

The end of Nihilism and Scientism, the unity of science and religion, reason and intuition, the Imagination, the two cultures reconciled. The unity of Unity, oneness, our fragile, delicate Earth, three dimensional in its fullness, floating through eternal timelesssness. A new panorama rises before humanity.

The Parliament of Poets, nearly three years of writing, after decades, a full rough draft.

Frederick Glaysher

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